Freelancer

[Zenicetus]

If you want something with a bit more meat, the most involved and dynamic sandbox space shooters are the "X" series of game. The latest is X3:Reunion. It's well over two years old now, but has been re-issued with quite a few updates and additional content over the original. (It originally came with Starforce copy protection, which was removed in the re-issue.) It's also available on Steam for direct download.

The graphics are far superior to Freelancer, but don't require anything outlandish to run, and another big difference is that you can eventually acquire multiple ships, hire pilots, and form squadrons of space craft. I believe you can even conquer and own whole planets.

Be warned though, it has a fairly complex learning curve and probably will require a joystick to fly combat missions properly. Still, everybody that takes the time to get into it simply raves about it.

Well, not everyone raves about it. I was a hardcore space sim/flight sim addict (before that whole genre mysteriously died out), and I didn't like X3 at all. I tried to like it, and spent a lot of time with it because there was nothing else around, but too many things bothered me, like....

* Dumb, predictable enemy pilot AI, and simplistic two-dimensional "fighter on rails" combat with restricted speed limits (something I really hate in these types of games). I just didn't find the combat that much fun, and combat can't be easily avoided. The only space sim where I really enjoyed the pure flying/fighting style was Independence War 2, which at least made a stab at realistic physics.

* All the action in X3 takes place on square spatial grids between jump points, and those action areas are fairly small, with objectives close together. Probably a necessary consequence of the silly speed limit caps, but the game world felt pretty cramped, for a "space" game.

* In X3 there are capital ships like cruisers and battleships as well as the usual fighters, but they have no separate crew or in-depth systems management. So they fly and fight just like big, lumbering fighters with more firepower. I appreciate that they do let you fly a capital ship... something most of these games don't do, but the way they did it feels like a cheap shortcut.

* You can become an industrial power with a private space navy, but there is no conquest mode for capturing and controlling territory. It always belongs to someone else, even though you may have factories and other assets there. And there is no diplomacy mode to interact with the main factions that control space. Just trade and piracy interaction, basically. This leads to a big disconnect in the late phase of the sandbox game, when you're tooling around with the most powerful navy in space, but that's not reflected in any of the interactions with the main factions. You're the Rodney Dangerfield of space -- can't get any respect. So there is no real reward for attaining that industrial and combat power, aside from just beating up on everyone for the hell of it.

Anyway, it's worth trying if you like space games. Not everyone will have my objections, and I know some people like it. Also, that review is from about a year after the game was released.... I don't know how far the modders have taken it.

I do highly recommend Independence War 2 though, if you haven't played it and you like space games. For me, it was the absolute best of the genre and hasn't been surpassed... at least in terms of the spaceflight and combat physics. Unfortunately, that great game engine was trapped inside a restrictive, hard-coded linear storyline, instead of being more of a free-form exploration/adventure format. So it's a love/hate relationship for me, but it's still my personal high-water mark for this type of game.

[Forward Observer]

Well, not everyone raves about it. I was a hardcore space sim/flight sim addict (before that whole genre mysteriously died out), and I didn't like X3 at all. I tried to like it, and spent a lot of time with it because there was nothing else around, but too many things bothered me, like....

------.

Most of the people I remember who liked the game were raving about the sand box nature and the dynamic universe of the game. However, I do remember several flight sim friends who complained about the space combat being pretty weak. I also remember them bitching that originally the ships didn't even have interior cockpit views, but I heard this was eventually modded or patched in.

I have a copy of the game that I picked up on the cheap, but have never even loaded it on my system. I am an old combat flight simmer and I always try to like space sims, but I never seem to finish them--IWar, Freespace I and II, Starlancer, Tachyon---I have them all and have never made it past more than halfway through any of them.

I think it has to do with the fact that in a regular planet based flight sim I always get a sense of actually flying while I'm dogfighting, but in a space sim I always feel like I'm simply sitting and spinning in one spot while enemies buzz at me from different directions. I-War did make an attempt to overcome this with the physics trails through space, but I lost interest in it too for some reason.

Oddly, the only space combat game that I ever finished was Freelancer, and that probably was because it was so short--lol

Cheers

[aimlesswanderer]

Freelancer was ok, but the static economy was annoying. Tried a few mods, but they couldn't make it dynamic enough.

The X series certainly isn't for everyone, but I thought that they were great. The economy is very complex, which can be a turn off, but it is really interesting if you like that. I agree that not being able to conquer territory was a problem. The learning curve for noobs is really steep too.

It's a real pity that the space sim genre has nearly died out. Privateer 1&2, Wing Commmander, Xwing, I spent serious amounts of time playing them, and had great fun. One can only hope for the future...

[rajpoot]

One can only hope for the future...

That's it, hope for the future, with the awesome graphics and super machines today, perhaps one of the game giants might consider trying for a space sim again.........maybe even Microsoft will reconsider the third part, the sequel to Freelancer.......they do have a good story to carry on.......and why not.........Fallout has been revived after quite some time hasn't it.

[Whacker]

Freelancer was a good game. It kept me entertained for a while, and the story was cheesy but worth following. Oddly enough one of my biggest complaints was the lack of real exploration or extensive plot development in the German systems. Something ya'll might want to try is the Discovery mod. Discovery is compatible with the original campaign and it allows for "open" single player, where one doesn't need to follow the storyline. Also all manner of ships are available to the player, from light fighters on up to battleships.

X3 is an interesting animal, and I share a number of Zenicetus's complaints about it. Even with the Xtended mod, combat didn't feel different between capital ships and fighters. There's an Xtended submod that attempts to prolong and redo a number of the combat variables (weapon power, shields, etc) but I haven't tried it.

[rajpoot]

Looks like space combat is not so dead after all
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/sim/darkhorizon/index.html

[Forward Observer]

Looks like space combat is not so dead after all
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/sim/darkhorizon/index.html

Interesting, but I couldn't find any info as to whether if it includes the ability to fly with a joystick or if it is limited to mouse contol only like Freelancer was?

[Zenicetus]

Looks like space combat is not so dead after all
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/sim/darkhorizon/index.html

I don't know... I watched the in-game video linked from there:

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/sim/darkh...=user_vids;img

... and it's not grabbing me. I'm seeing the same simplistic, unrealistic-looking combat that bothers me in other games. The view is locked to the cockpit frame (no padlock) so you're just steering a window around. The ships are VERY close together in combat with VERY little difference in velocity. Probably a speed cap too. Nothing looks like it's moving very fast. Energy weapons (if they are energy weapons) fire like bullets; slow-moving in an arc if the ship's nose is swinging around, with a need to "lead the target" like you're shooting a machine gun. Basically the same crap we've been seeing since Wing Commander, with few exceptions (and yes, I liked that first game, but more for what it represented at that particular time in PC gaming).

Those design decisions are made to keep ships close enough to see in combat, so it's "exciting." The ships fly like atmospheric fighters, so the players don't get confused with real Newtonian motion away from a gravity well. Actually they fly more like WWII piston planes than modern fighters, in terms of engagement distance and relative speeds. But the genre conventions have become a straight-jacket now, a lazy way to program these games. Everyone is just endlessly repeating those early efforts like Wing Commander and Tie Fighter with better graphics but no creative thinking. Gamers are supposed to accept this without wanting anything better, I guess. And yeah... I suppose I'll still buy Dark Horizons if the reviews aren't terrible, because I'm such a sucker for space games. But that video looks like the same-old, same-old to me.

This looks more like what I'd like to see -- a Russian game called "The Tomorrow War." I don't know how good the rest of the game is, or if it'll ever come out in English but I like what I'm seeing here. Skip the first video and watch the other two, especially the last one:

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008...r-hard-sci-fi/

Check out the free motion of your virtual head inside the cockpit (hopefully with a padlock option), the instantaneous fire of energy weapons, the way one of the fighters in formation suddenly zooms away from the others at a tremendous speed (about 1:44 in the third video). Just the overall realistic, "flight simmy" feel of the thing. I don't know how far it goes in true Newtonian motion, but it looks better to me than that Dark Horizons video. Basically what I want is the "Orbiter" sim (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbiter_(sim) with guns. And a powerful enough engine to stay reasonably close to a target in combat without giving up Newtonian physics, like the Independence War game engine. Is that too much to ask? Maybe the Russians can pull this off, if Western game developers have abandoned the genre.

There's another project that looks interesting, and supposedly going for realism -- "Infinity":

http://www.infinity-universe.com/Inf...d=12&Itemid=33

But it's a MMO and I just don't have the schedule freedom to play that type of game these days. Also it sounds like it's a long way from release.